The Problem
Over the course of the last fifteen years, the values of industry leaders in the hobby of game design have shifted away from designing for players to designing for maximum profit. Microtransactions, toxic preorder bonuses, live service games, and even games being forcefully and secretly removed from your online libraries, have made it so that you, the consumer, have little to no authority over your existing investments. That's only listing some of the controversial issues. There's a great deal more!
Why Gaming on XP is One of the Ultimate Acts of Defiance
Having a legacy machine puts the power of ownership back into your hands. Games from the late 1970s to the late 2000s were whole on release. They were as pro-consumer as can be. They were designed to make money, they were designed to be fun. The money was a byproduct reward of a well designed game. In short, it was an art worked on by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
Realistically speaking, there is nothing that megacorporations can do to damage the integrity of a legacy machine with a physical library. A computer of any age can be built, from legendary Amiga or Sinclair machines of the 70s and 80s through to recent discontinued Windows compatible machines. However, nothing will get you farther than a well-built XP machine.
A powerful XP 32-bit machine can be built for as little as a hundred dollars with parts sourced locally or from eBay and is, through one reason or another, far more compatible with games across a 40 year timeline than any other possible machine. Emulation can be done for all pre-Windows games. When it comes to Windows itself, realistically starting with Windows 95 designed games, most titles will natively work on XP - even with Service Pack 3 and all the updates installed. Old graphic renderers such as the glide API, as well as old sound card APIs can also be emulated with minimal effort, so 90s Windows games are completely accessible too. Games that are very stubborn to get running may have community patches. In fact, many of them do. Out of the thousands of games I have run on XP, the number of games that refused to run under any circumstances can be counted on a single hand!
When you're gaming on a Windows XP, you aren't giving your time or money to bad actors in the game design industry. You're voting with your wallet by keeping it closed to them. If enough people exit out of the market, perhaps it can force industry leaders to reevaluate what made games great in the first place.
Don't Forget to Pair It With a Good Old Monitor
I've never been an advocate for old CRTs, because of their tremendous weight, mass, and aging internals, but there's no denying that that is the most authentic way to playing most of these games. I recommend a sacrifice of some picture quality and just getting a more modern LCD monitor either in 1280x1024 resolution, which is close to perfect - or a 1600x1200 resolution monitor, which IS perfect. These resolutions are both a drastic improvement over modern HD and 4K displays for several reasons.
- The lower pixel count improves the image quality on all older games, because they were more likely to have been designed around that specification.
- Having any 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio monitor will remove the warping of interfaces and textures in older games.
- Many older games had resolution caps. Having a lower native resolution monitor will either make the cut or be close enough to minimize the visual quality loss.
- It will put less strain on your older hardware than there would be if your machine was trying to display on a massive, modern screen.
True Ownership
When you play on a legacy machine, you can rest assured that everything you play on it is truly yours. There are no middle men programs, like digital rights managers, that stand in the way of you being able to launch your titles. This is especially important for enjoying your collection in offline or poor internet connection situations.
There's more to it than just that. While most modern games are designed with multiplayer in mind, the games of the past were designed with singleplayer in mind. Multiplayer was a bonus, not a necessity. Beginning in the late 1990s, many notable games introduced excellent offline multiplayer with competitive, challenging A.I. team mates and opponents, giving the opportunity for infinite replayability. It is because of this that legendary games Unreal Tournament and Quake III can still be enjoyed today after over 25 years. This kind of design is sorely lacking in modern games.
If a modern multiplayer-focused game is abandoned by the playerbase, then there's no way to ever revisit it again. Star Wars: Battlefront from 2004 can still be enjoyed in its entirety, because of offline A.I. modes. The reboot multiplayer-only game from 2016 is a digital ghost town. What would you rather invest in?
Countless Games are Rich With Extra Content from Modding Communities
Modding games was a huge part of PC games from the 90s and 2000s. Many of the modding communities for classic games never left, continuing to this day in creating new, expansive content or overhauls. This means that some games have thousands of new maps, dozens of new game modes, HD overhauls, or even new campaigns. All of this is free forever. A beloved game can be explored in entirely new and exciting ways.
While modding is still a part of the gaming scene today, it is the sheer nature of these games having been out for decades that ensures the probability of quality content being ready for download. In this sense, it's just like wine; the age improves the quality of content!
There's Tens of Thousands of Us Online and Playing Together
If a community truly loves a game, then it won't let it die ever. There are communities and programs galore that allow people to connect and play multiplayer on what should be long dead games. Programs like GameRanger enable players to connect and duke it out on nearly a thousand games! On average, there's between 14 and 30 thousand online users at any given time. Most of these users are on legacy machines, continuing to frag like it's 1999! That's just one service too!
There are other services that are community-driven and are working to restore functionality on old gaming services such as GameSpy, MSN Gaming Zone, and Xfire. That's just to name a few. They're functional and continue getting better every day. Even some games get community multiplayer patches that redirect dead links from defunct master servers to active links to community-operated servers. With the retro gaming community, if there's a will, there's a way!
